Indigo Asteroid


Imagine, a frigid, distant shadow-region in the far suburbs of our Solar System, where a myriad of twirling icy objects--some large, some small--orbit our Sun in a mysterious, mesmerizing phantom-like ballet within this eerie and strange swath of darkness. Here, where our Sun is so far away that it hangs suspended in an alien sky of perpetual twilight, looking just like a particularly large star traveling through a sea of smaller stars, is the Kuiper Belt--a mysterious, distant deep-freeze that astronomers are only now first beginning to explore. Makemake is a denizen of this remote region, a dwarf planet that is one of the largest known objects inhabiting the Kuiper Belt, sporting a diameter that is about two-thirds the size of Pluto. In April 2016, a team of astronomers announced that, while peering into the outer limits of our Solar System, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) discovered a tiny, dark moon orbiting Makemake, which is the second brightest icy dwarf planet--after Pluto--in the Kuiper Belt. A Lunar Eclipse is when our blue/green globe saunters between the trusty moon and glowing sun, our planet completely blocks the luminous rays of the sun but the moon remains visible. "The near-side of the Moon has been studied for centuries, and yet continues to offer up surprises for scientists with the right tools. We interpret the gravity anomalies discovered by GRAIL as part of the lunar magma plumbing system--the conduits that fed lava to the surface during ancient volcanic eruptions," Dr. Maria Zuber explained in an October 1, 2014 NASA Press Release. Dr. Zuber is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.